It’s ok to talk about work in therapy

photo by Tina Floersch courtesy of Unsplash

I know a lot of people who feel like they don’t want to waste their therapy hour on work problems. For some people, problems at their job don’t count as “real problems” and shouldn’t require therapy. Others want to use therapy for the “really hard” personal stuff, and it can feel like you’re helping the man / the machine / the capitalism if you’re giving work issues space during your personal time. And honestly, if that’s how you feel, that’s totally ok. I will never make you talk about work in therapy if that’s not what’s alive for you and not what you want to explore. I respect you and your choices. What I want to do here is open up the conversation on work as it relates to mental health.

Because I firmly believe with all of my being that work absolutely relates to mental health.

How you feel in your job shows up in your personal life

The straightforward argument here is that, if you are like a lot of people, you spend a lot of time at work. 30, 40, 50+ hours is a lot of time to be anywhere doing anything. If you’re miserable at work, or if a particular work relationship is tense, or if your stress at work is overwhelming, it really impacts your mental health. But it’s more than that because if your mental health at work is suffering, it will likely spill over into your personal life and personal relationships as well. That’s not a personal failing, it’s just how humans work. Even with the best boundaries, it would take a lot of real self-care (not binging your favorite TV show) to offset the damage of the work week if work feels miserable. Perhaps you don’t think that work deserves to show up to therapy, but work feelings might show up in your life whether you want them to or not.

Your personal material shows up to your job, too

When you show up to work, your personal material does, too—like how you relate to those in power, how you relate to peers, and how you deal with (or run away from) conflict. You might have a boss you absolutely hate and who makes your life miserable. Yes, that’s a work problem, but also isn’t that interesting? Does everyone also hate your boss, or are there people who seem to get along with them just fine? Look, your boss might be a ginormous jack-wagon and I will never gaslight you about that. But also, what is it about their brand of jack-wagonry that activates you so much? When you think about them or are in a meeting with them, what’s your somatic experience? Are the feelings familiar to you in any way? Are you having some “feelings memories” (all credit to Janina Fisher for this term) that are stirred up by but unrelated to that person?

Once we begin to look at your experiences with curiosity, we might find that they’re beautiful entry points to doing deeper work on a personal level. That means we can both access the deeper material from the past and work on noticing your current here-and-now experiences in order to better support yourself and your nervous system. We can’t, of course, make your boss not a jack-wagon (they might need their own therapy for that), but we might be able to lessen your reactivity to them or explore the ways in which you can reclaim your agency in the situation.

Aren’t you just trying to make me more productive at work?

Absolutely not. Quite frankly, it’s not my job to care about your workplace’s need for your labor. I am not here to hold up capitalism or help your startup have hockey-stick growth. If I’m being honest, I can’t really get myself to care about those things at all, which is one of the reasons I left tech. My goal is to nurture your curiosity and awareness in such a way that you are able to live more thoughtfully and fully in the here-and-now. I have no illusions that you will always be happy, much less happy at a job, but I do think you deserve better than to be miserable at work even just some of the time.

(By the way, if you want to leave your job or even your career, I am also 100% here for that. It’s scary, but you can be brave!)

So yeah, work stuff can come into therapy

In summary, work issues really do have their place in therapy (if you want them to). We don’t need to talk about the specifics of your job or the company, but stress, relationships, and how you feel about going to work/doing your work/not doing your work are more than welcome.